Cancer Therapeutics
Effective cancer treatment is frequently inhibited by the inability of the patient to withstand an effective dose of a therapeutic drug, by the development of resistance to therapeutic drugs by cancer cells, or both. These problems are exhibited across a wide range of cancers and therapeutic drugs. Physicians and researchers have attempted to address these problems through various approaches, such as administering multiple therapeutic drugs at once or in series, but these solutions are not optimal because they frequently pose additional risks to the patient, such as increased rates of relapse, increased chances of opportunistic infections due to increased length of treatment, and increased chances of adverse drug reactions due to exposure to more drugs.
Many of these problems could be avoided or lessened by rendering the cancer cells more sensitive to one or more therapeutic drugs. However, safe and effective methods for sensitizing cancer cells in such a manner are lacking.
Rifamycin and Rifabutin
Rifabutin is a member of the rifamycin class of antibiotics. Rifabutin was approved for use as an antibiotic in the United States in 1992. Although rifabutin has been tested for other antibiotic and anti-inflammatory uses, its most common use remains the treatment of tuberculosis and other Mycobacterium infections. Rifampicin, another member of the rifamycin class of antibiotics, was introduced in 1967 and is also used to treat tuberculosis and similar infections.